Double Cross (2 page)
“One other thing,” I said.
Rawling arched an eyebrow, the way he always did when he wanted to ask a question. He'd been a quarterback for a university back on Earth when he was younger, and his wide shoulders showed it. Now his short, dark hair was streaked with gray. One of two medical doctors under the dome, he'd also recently been appointed replacement director of the Mars Project. It might sound strange to say that though he was in his mid-40s and I was only 14 (in Earth years), Rawling was a great friend. After all, until a month ago I'd been the only kid under the dome, so I didn't expect friends my age. Also, Rawling had worked with me for hours every day since I was eight, training me in a virtual-reality program to control a robot body as if it were my own.
“You don't need to worry about the strap,” I continued. “That's not why the dummy fell away from me.”
He arched his eyebrow again.
“It's the buckle,” I said. I pictured how it had opened. “While I was swinging, it banged into a piece of rock. That's what released it. You need some sort of safety guard on it.”
“Good point,” Rawling said. “Very good point. I'll get one of the techies to make the changes right away.”
What was his rush? I wondered. Today was supposed to be a normal school day for me, and Rawling had asked me to take time off to learn cliff climbing. “Rawling?”
“Yes?” He lifted my legs off the bed and helped me into my nearby wheelchair.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. “I mean, you don't expect that someday I'll actually have to lug someone down a cliff?”
Rawling didn't answer. Instead, he walked over to the computer and the transmitter and began to shut down the power.
“Rawling?”
He finally turned to me. “Tyce Sanders,” he said in a strange tone, “meet me in my office in five minutes.”
Until recently, the director's office had belonged to someone else. In the month since Rawling had taken over as director, he'd been so busy that he hadn't made any changes yet. The framed paintings of Earth scenes, like sunsets and mountains, still hung on the walls. Blaine Steven, the former director, had spent a lot of the government's money to get those luxuries included in the cargo shipped to Mars. But even a director didn't get bookshelves and real books. Cargo was too expensive. If people wanted books, they read them on DVD-gigarom.
Usually I admired the framed paintings because no one else in the dome had them. This time, however, my attention was on Rawling.
“Tyce,” Rawling said from behind his desk, “I don't want to believe what I think I'm seeing.”
“You're seeing me,” I said with a grin. He seemed so serious that I wanted to lighten him up. “What's hard to believe about that? You called for me five minutes ago, and here I am.”
“Very funny,” he said. No grin. “Let me get you a microphone and a crowd so they can throw tomatoes at you.”
“Tomatoes?”
As the only human ever born on Mars, I'd never been to Earth. But I knew tomatoes were something people on Earth grew and ate. I'd seen photos of them on my digital encyclopedia, but I'd never tasted them. And I sure couldn't figure out why people would throw them at me.
“It's an old Earth thing,” Rawling explained, obviously wishing he hadn't started this. “When they don't like a comedian or an actor, they throw rotten vegetables at him.”
“Hmm,” I said. “You sure tomatoes are vegetables? Some people argue thatâ”
“Not now. Please, not now.” Rawling stood and walked around his desk to where I sat in my wheelchair. “These are digital photos from the satellite,” he said, waving sheets of paper at me. Rawling meant the communications satellite that circled Mars. “If I'm seeing what I believe I'm seeing, you've got to promise to keep this absolutely secret. I'll be making a public report as soon as possible, but until then ⦔ He handed the photographs to me.
I studied them. Mars has nearly zero cloud cover, so unless a gigantic sandstorm is brewing, the satellite takes very clear photographs. They are sent by radio transmission to a computer here under the dome, then digitally translated into printouts of photos of the planet's surface.
What I saw in the photographs were different shots of a valley. In real life, the soil would be red and brown and orange. The black-and-white digital printouts just showed different shades of gray. The satellite had provided long shots and closeup shots, all taken from directly overhead, some five miles above the surface of the planet.
“Wow,” I said. “Rocks and more rocks. This looks so scary I don't think my heart can take it.”
Rawling sighed and squatted beside my wheelchair. “That,” he said, pointing to a square black rock in the center of one of the close-up photos, “is what's truly scary.”
Sensing he'd had enough of my joking around, I didn't make any more dumb remarks.
“Notice how absolutely smooth and square that rock is,” Rawling said.
Now that he mentioned it, I could see it was.
“You can't tell from the photo, but it's about the size of this office,” he continued. “Now keep looking. You'll see several more.”
He was right. In the jumble of boulders in the valley, I counted four more of those strangely smooth, strangely square gigantic rocks. “You've got me interested,” I said. “What are they? How did they get there?”
“Not so fast,” Rawling said firmly. He paced for a few seconds, then stopped. “First question: why haven't we seen them before? I mean, our satellite has been circling Mars ever since the dome was established almost 15 Earth years ago. Suddenly this.”
I thought of yesterday's big event. A rumble had shaken the dome. It felt like an earthquakeâmarsquakeâhad occurred miles and miles away. Or like an asteroid had banged into Mars. Although no damage had been done, it had rattled things briefly, and it was all anyone could talk aboutâscientists in their labs, techies running the experiments for the scientists, me, Mom, Dad, and my new friend, Ashley Jordan.
“First answer,” I guessed. “It has something to do with that explosion we felt yesterday.”
“Exactly. There's a lot of soil now exposed to the surface that wasn't there before yesterday. In other words, those square black things were buried.”
“I give up,” I said. “What are they? How did they get there?”
Rawling shook his head. “All I can tell you is I'm nearly certain those black things aren't a natural part of Mars.”
“They couldn't have come from Earth,” I reasoned. “Otherwise we'd know about them already, right? I mean, the Mars Project is the first time anyone from Earth has landed on Mars. And if no one from Earth put them there ⦔ I stopped, too afraid to say what I was thinking:
If no one from Earth had put them there, who had done it?
Rawling read my mind. He nodded. “Now you understand why I don't want to believe what I think I'm seeing.”
“Now I understand,” I answered.
“Which is why I called you here,” he said slowly as if he wished he hadn't had to call me into his office.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Tyce, you can say no if you don't want to do it.”
“No to what?”
“It's absolutely
imperative
that we take a closer look at those things. The trouble is, it won't be as easy as a practice run. Not considering where we need to go.”
That's when Rawling went over his plan with me, step by step.
“Why is there something instead of nothing?” Ashley asked me, hand on her right hip in her trademark pose.
I'd promised Rawling I'd return to work with him after talking through his plan with my mom, Kristy, a leading plant biologist, and my dad, Chase, an interplanetary pilot. But first I'd wheeled across half of the dome to return to where Ashley and I had been studying some math questions.
Since the dome's total area was about the size of four Earth football fields, I never had to travel far. Besides the small, plastic minidomes of the scientists and techies, there were experimental labs and open areas where equipment was maintained. The main level of the dome held the minidomes and laboratories. One level up, a walkway about 10 feet wide circled the inside of the dome walls. People mostly used the walkway for jogging. Not me, of course. The techies had built a ramp for my wheelchair so I could access the second level and then the third and smallest level by a narrow catwalk.
Centered at the top of the dome, this third level was only 15 feet wide. On its deck a powerful telescope perched beneath a round bubble of clear glass that stuck up from the black glass that formed the rest of the dome. From there, the massive telescope gave an incredible view of the solar system.
This was my home, and I loved it. And it was even better now that I had a friend my age. A month ago Ashley Jordan had arrived on the most recent spaceship with her father, Dr. Shane Jordan, a quantum physicist. Like me, she was a science freak. Even better, she was fun to be aroundâeven if she did ask strange questions.
Something instead of nothing?
“Something what?” I asked. “Nothing where? I thought we were going to work on calculus.”
It was midafternoon. We sat in an open area near the gardens, with the giant curved ceiling of the dome stretching in all directions. It was quiet here, with only the occasional conversations of passing scientists or techies to interrupt us.
“Calculus.” Ashley made a face, as if she'd tasted something awful. “More fun to daydream.” Pointing to her handheld computer, she continued, “And I was getting tired of the teacher. That monotone voice is enough to drive you crazy.”
I nodded. I knew what she meant. I'd learned most of my school stuff through DVD-gigarom too. When I was little, I'd actually talked in a monotone for a while because I thought the voices on the computer were from real people.
“So you began to daydream,” I said. “About nothing? Or something?”
For years, I'd envied Earth kids because when they went to school, they could talk to someone. Now, finally, even though it was only a classroom of two, I was in school too. Even if the conversation didn't make much sense.
“This universe,” Ashley said, pointing upward through the ceiling of the dome. “Solar system. Mars. Earth. Sun. Why should all of this stuff be here? Why not nothing?”
I peered closely at her. With her short black hair and a serious look on her face, she appeared older than 13. And because her dark brown, almond-shaped eyes could be very unreadable, it was sometimes difficult to figure out if she was joking.
Like now. I waited for her to light up with a big grin, which, when it happened, would change her from mysterious to tomboyish.
“Well?” she said impatiently. She pressed her lips together and squinted at me. “I'm waiting for an answer.”
So she wasn't joking.
“Try to picture nothing,” Ashley said when all I did was scratch my head.
“Sure,” I said. I thought for a second. “Done.”
“No,” she said. “I disagree. You didn't picture nothing.”
I held up my hands in protest. “You can't disagree! You don't even know what I was thinking!”
“Whatever you were thinking was wrong,” Ashley said. “You
can't
picture nothing.”
“Butâ”
“You can picture an empty jar. Or maybe a big room with nothing in it. Or even all the space between the stars. But whenever you picture nothing, don't you picture something that's holding all that nothing?”
“Well, maybe Iâ”
“So why should there be something instead of nothing? You know, all the stuff that makes the stars and the planets. Why can't there be nothing? And where did the something come from? Did it exist forever? But how can something exist forever? If first there was nothing, how did it suddenly become something? I mean, you don't make rocks the size of a planet from empty air. Then think about all the stars and planets in the entire universe. Those came from nothing? Ha! Andâ”
“Ashley!” I said. “You're making me dizzy.”
Finally she grinned. “I'm making myself dizzy.”
“At least we agree on
something
.”
She nodded, and her tiny silver cross earrings flashed. She reached up to touch them. “I think it's cool to spend time wondering about God and why we're put into this universe.”
I returned her nod. It was cool. There are so many mysteries that science is far from figuring out, yet God knows about them. A person could spend a lifetime thinking about God and everything he's done and never get bored.
Ashley closed her handheld computer. “I'm done for the day. How about you?”
I thought of what Rawling had asked me to do. How he'd made me promise not to tell anyone except my parents.
“Me too,” I said. “At least with my schoolwork. We've done enough this week that we're ahead, right?”
Ashley nodded again. “Right. Let's go see how Flip and Flop are doing.”
Flip and Flop are the little koala-like animals that she and I had rescued from a genetics experiment gone wrong. And just in the nick of time too. It hadn't taken long for the techies at the dome to adopt the friendly creatures as mascots.
“Wish I could,” I said, “but I need to ask my parents something.”
Ashley shrugged. “See you tonight, then? At the telescope?”
“Sure,” I said.
I just hopedâafter everything else Rawling had told meâthat tonight wouldn't be my last time to see Ashley ⦠or anyone else, for that matter.
An hour later, I sat at the computer in my room in the minidome I shared with my parents. Aside from my desk, there was a bed. Not much else. Under the dome, everybody wore the standard uniformâa navy blue jumpsuitâso I didn't need a big closet. And because I was always in a wheelchair, I didn't need a chair.
